Contributor Afternoon Antwerp 2018 – Design table recap

On 2 and 3 March 2018, WordCamp Antwerp (Belgium) was held for the second time. We had around 50 people attending the Contributor Afternoon. The focus for this day was on Core, Documentation, Support, Community, Polyglots and Design.

It was my first time as a design table lead, and we had four people in total attending the design table in various shifts. After a short introduction and explaining about the communication and documentation structure we currently use on Slack, Trac, Trello and the Design blog on make.wordpress.org, we looked into what tickets or projects could be worked on during the afternoon.

Another attendee had both design and development experience, and worked on new dashicons. Thanks to @empireoflight for responding very quickly to the new contributor’s questions via Slack, 2 fixes were made for dashicons.

Toon, Gijs and Monique at Contributor Day Antwerp 2018

By the end of the afternoon, we had 2 more people joining the design table and we discussed what type of work is done by the design team. There’s still a misunderstanding that design is only about ‘making something look nice’ and that you cannot contribute if you can’t draw. We busted this myth together, emphasising that contributing to the WordPress design team means contributing to the overall user experience of people using WordPress.

In the end, we evaluated the afternoon and talked about how easy people find it to contribute to design. Overall, contributors said they really needed the explanation given this afternoon on the used channels and their purpose. As well, the long list of blogs on the make.wordpress.org/design landing page isn’t very inviting to read through.

We concluded that it had been an educating and interesting afternoon and people were inspired to continue to contribute online.